Perhaps more than any other composer, Robert Schumann is known for his lifelong passion for literature. The son of a book dealer, publisher and translator, he earnestly contemplated a literary career during an adolescence focussed as much on poetic as on musical pursuits. ‘Poet and composer in one person’, Schumann later recalled of himself; he was referring particularly to Lieder he composed in the late 1820s, yet one could also read the epithet as expressing a broader compositional ambition. One regularly finds belles lettres paired with music in Schumann's autobiographical comments about his formative years: Jean Paul stood alongside Schubert, Goethe alongside Bach. Music helped feed a burning Theaterpassion: between 1823 and 1827 he heard Weber's Der Freischütz and Preciosa, Cherubini's The Water Carrier (Der Wasserträger), Rossini's The Thieving Magpie (Die diebische Elster) and Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, among several other stage works.

Not surprisingly, Schumann's initial compositional forays nourished his literary bent, beginning with some larger choral and orchestral works written in his eleventh year, and soon after ‘some numbers for an opera, several vocal pieces, [and] several things for piano’. As a twelve-year-old, he bestowed the distinction of ‘Œuvre 1’ on a setting of Psalm 150, the vivid timbral imagery of the text realized by an unusual bevy of instruments. When Schumann ultimately decided to follow a career in music, against his mother's wishes that he study law, he expressed his choice in literary terms, equating music with poetry, jurisprudence with prose.